A messy mixture of everything I love

Books

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Like a (deeper) Bukowski in Europe. Paris, its streets, bars and hidden places, and a man wandering in it, searching with his weird friends for women, a distraction, something to pass time by. Sex, alcohol, literature, art, and Paris, Paris, Paris.

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Sherlock Holmes for me means tea and warm blankets and stories set in cold evenings with protagonists wrapped in scarves, hats and long overcoats. This little book found on a second-hand bookshop contains short stories with no chronological order. The last story is the one that gives the title to the collection, and it’s also the epilogue: set in 1914, Sherlock, retired and living in the country with his bees, decides to take one last case. I think you can find almost all the ebooks for free on iBooks and Kindle since there is no problem with the copyright, so you have no excuse for not reading them.

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Hello there! Are you looking for something to read or to watch in this super hot summer (or cold winter, depending on where you are now)? Check out my latest obsessions and tell me yours in the comments! Also don’t forget to become a fan of my Facebook page Jumbleskine :)

TO READ:

Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares – David Levithan & Rachel Cohn // link
I absolutely love how these two writers work together. Their voices are original and merge perfectly. I fell in love with them during my first year of high school with the book Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. That story might be about music, but this is all about books. And bookshops and book quotes, Christmas and underdogs in New York with weird families and a little notebook that contains more than they’ve never said to anyone they know.
If you love books and you want a light, cute and funny story, this is for you.

TO WATCH:

Sense8 (Netflix Original Series)
Netflix just keeps surprising me. In Perù Netflix exists (not in Italy) and they even have a one-month free trial, so I decided to do it and watch every possible tv show my schedule could allow me to watch.
Netflix describes Sense8 as “8 strangers from cities around the globe begin having experiences that defy explanation”. They can see each other, they can use the others’ abilities to save themselves from difficult situations, they can feel what the others are feeling.
Sense8 became after a few episodes one of the best shows I have ever seen. A masterpiece.

House of Cards (Netflix Original Series)
Like Game of Thrones but in the present world. Politics, sex, power, everything you need to keep you glued to your tv or laptop for hours. Francis (Frank) and Claire are a power couple that you need to see.

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I was lucky enough to have watched the movie but not remember absolutely anything.“Off Magazine Street” was a gift by my friend Martina, who participated to the #ioleggoperché (= #Ireadbecause) initiative organised by many Italian publishers for World Book Day (signing up to their website months before, you could have 10 free books, bookmarks and even a t-shirt, and you had to give them away to friends and relatives…I found out about it too late).

After some time laying on my bedside table, I started it around one/two weeks ago, and I slowly but constantly carried on reading it. There was nothing shocking to find out on the next chapter, no suspense, however I found myself taking it night after night. A weird kind of magic.

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Today on Jumbleskine: good short books thay have stayed in my heart / I’ve really liked.
For that time when you want to read something meaningful at the airport waiting for your flight, on the subway, on a free afternoon with a cup of tea.

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“Once I heard a famous Afro-American writer say that from the time she was a little girl she felt like a stranger in her family and her hometown. She added that nearly all writers have experienced that feeling, even if they have never left their native city. It’s a condition inherent in that profession, she suggested; without the anxiety of feeling different she wouldn’t have been driven to write. Writing, when all is said and done, is an attempt to understand one’s own circumstance and to clarify the confusion of existence, including insecurities that do not torment normal people, only chronic nonconformists, many of whom end up as writers after having failed in other undertakings. This theory lifted a burden from my shoulders. I am not a monster; there are others like me.

I never fit in anywhere: not into my family, social class, or the religion fate bestowed on me. I didn’t belong to the neighbourhood gangs that rode their bikes in the street, my cousins didn’t include me in their games, I was the least popular girl in my school, and for a long time I was the last one to be invited to dance at parties – a torment, I like to think, due more to shyness than to looks. I clocked myself in my pride, pretending it didn’t matter to me, but I would have sold my soul to the devil to be part of a group had Satan presented me with such an attractive proposition. The source of my difficulties has always been the same: an inability to accept what to others seem natural, and an irresistible tendency to voice opinions no one wants to hear, trait that frightened more than one potential suitor (I don’t want to give a false impression, there weren’t many). Later, during my years as a journalist, curiosity and boldness had their advantages. For the first time I was part of a community, I had absolute liberty to ask indiscreete questions and divulge myideas […].”

I can read even more than 3 or 4 books at the time, they just have to be of different topics. I’ve done this all my life, reading the book I feel like reading at that moment. This also has a downside, that is having an absurdly huge pile on my bedside table. The books I’m currently reading are…